Atheists love to mock the Ascension. They say how absurd it is that someone who it is claimed is a God is taken up to Heaven like a rocket. Obviously a myth, they say.

As he said this he was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
(Acts of the Apostles 1:1-11A)

How He leaves physically for the last time doesn’t seem important to me. What matters is if He is still here in spirit. I think He is here in spirit. Indeed, because millions follow Him every day, that can’t be denied. But I still can’t put hand on heart and say without any shadow of doubt that somewhere He is alive now in the same way as we are alive.

I suppose the answer too is given today:

“Until now you have not asked for anything in my name.”

John 16:23-28

The Gospel reading brought me up. From John 16:20-23:

“But your sorrow will turn to joy.”

Why was I less joyous or could not repeat in ordinary life the joy one finds in a monastery?

The answer, I think, is in the intensity of prayer.

We went to Mass at St Patrick’s Soho Square to celebrate its wonderful restoration under the loving care of Fr Alexander Sherbrooke. The Mass said and sung beautifully in Latin by Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, was truly impressive. The gold and brilliant white of the stunning architecture rang out.

But I kept asking myself the question.

Who are we?

I was reading Jesus The Teacher Within by Lawrence Freeman OSB and one passage struck me most forcibly. Jesus asks the question: Who do you say I am?

But the question we should ask ourselves is: Who am I?

If we ask it again and again the ego starts to fall away like a stick stirring a fire, it does its job and burns away just as our ego must burn away.

To make progress we must plumb the depths of our minds, drilling ever deeper to what lies within.

But I have always had this elusive thought that deep within it is not so much as there is nothing but a unity with everything.

In other words the ego or the individual is not predominant. Unity is.